“Rich People Can’t Stop”: The Luxe Quarantine Lives of Silicon Valley’s Elite
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
Good for those teachers, and if it's causing problems for school systems maybe they should treat their teachers better.
Teachers are not their slaves. They can choose work that is better.
On the other hand, forcing me to pay for your education is not fundamental. It is robbery.
I have many family members that work or have worked in education. Sure, they all wished they were paid more. But none of them would have said that money was their #1 complaint. Money wouldn't ever have been in the top ten. Of all the teachers I know who have quit, money wasn't the reason.
So, the teachers should be stuck with lower pay because you care about wealth inequality? Why would this specific teacher should be the one who gets punished?
I'm sure there are many other examples to make the same point.
This teacher example is a bad one.
Do you have any way to show this? Do student outcomes actually vary with the amount of funding the school gets? At the very least, the Kansas City Experiment [0] says that dumping infinite money into a failing school district doesn't materially impact outcomes.
0: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-06-22-950622...
Would you say those middle class parents have “unfair access” as well?
Speaking as one of them, yes. What's unfair is that good schools are only afforded to the middle class and up.
A good school is one in which the children attending the school have secure home environments, where there is secure food, heat, internet, AC, transportation, quiet, and other fundamentals that are conducive to education. The students peers also need to the same to create the culture of learning. Most importantly, there is a set of parents who have the time and energy to keep up with the kids’ education and plug any gaps along the way. Bonus if the parents themselves have connections and resources to boost their kids’ access to connections and resources. E.g. knowing doctors who can show the way around medical education, lawyers who can show the way around the legal world, etc.
Unfair is the state of the world, and unless we want to close to income/wealth gap and give parents the ability to not have to work 2 jobs, or 7 days a week, or choose between fixing a car or eating dinner, the unfairness of schools has nothing to do with the schools or management of the schools themselves.
However, you don't have to eliminate the wealth/income gap to achieve that. Providing social supports enjoyed by wealthier areas (universal Pre-K, universal healthcare, drug/alcohol treatment, small business loans) will help significantly.
I was responding to it in whatever sense you used it originally. But since you ask, a safe, inclusive environment that maximizes the inherent learning potential of the broadest number of its students.
I know full well that is heavily influenced by the resources of the students before they set foot in the door - it's unconscionable that we have children relying on schools for meals, that we require schools to function as trauma intervention centers for children who have experienced severe violence in their homes or communities[1] - but that's the society we've built.
To change that will require a significant injection of resources to the communities that are disadvantaged this way - whether they are in South Central LA or Appalachia.
1. A trained trauma psychologist can add $100k to the budget of a school per year. "Good schools" don't need that kind of person on staff.
The metrics by which “good schools” are measured don't measure teaching, they measure outcomes that are determined almost entirely by the out-of-school upbringing and socioeconomic background of students.
What was different there vs communities with "bad schools" was that we didn't face systemic deprivation and de-resourcing. This was a community with a significant (though waning) number of union jobs, and largely stable households. There were lots of problems, no doubt - including racism - but within the confines of the community, you didn't need to have professional educated parents in order to have chance at maximizing your educational potential.
There's little evidence that they generally are, is my point. Once you control for individual factors that contribute to student success outside of the school they go to, there's very little evidence that differences between schools have much effect.
Paying the teachers better isn't immoral either.
Feel free to use other anecdotes.
This one is a bad anecdote.
There is absolutely no lack of people who want to teach.
It is causing problems for the school systems, not for the politicians who starve such sectors of resources. This is like claiming that the current issues of the US postal service are the fault of your mailman, rather than the corrupt head of the USPS who is willing to destroy billions of dollars of capital so that his master can win an election.
Take WW1 or WW2 for example. The rich/aristocratic flew away from troubled zones. In the times of famine or drought, I do not recall anyone from rich class suffered.
Why covid should be different? It is the way it always have been. Instead of thinking of rich and poor people, I have started to view them as "roles". I bet that the people who are pointing fingers at rich today would behave the same if they were to become rich. The behaviour largely remains same just the actual people keep changing.
As far as a billionaire holding parties during a pandemic that killed over a hundred thousand people, you threaten them with jail time. It works, if you don't have a corrupt state.
The same pattern has played out in the past. This was not meant to be an argument per-se but a meta-observation.
You just need a government that wasn't captured by the rich, or any other elite. It's not impossible to attain. In fact, simply making the justice system free of charge and not allow advantages from money, the castration of the power of the executive, electoral reform to end the two-party system, income caps on representatives with complete removal of external financing, the implementation of referendums on major bills every 6 months and bolstering of direct democracy, réglementation on media to limit consolidation and financing, super-linear fine in relation to income, increased taxation of the top earners, and universal Healthcare.
It even that doesn't work, then the nuclear option is to progressively turn every corporation of over 3-10 employees into a co-op. Now you really can't have an elite anymore.
How would you change it? Even if you taxed Travis at 90%, he'd still be a billionaire and could hold parties, maybe a little less lavish.
Or would you make private jets illegal?
Once the virus is under control, then everyone is allowed to have parties given certain measures are fixed.
the french revolution?
What followed made Karl Marx write the "The Class of Struggles" [2]
Excerpt from the wiki: "The industrial bourgeoisie still occupied a comparatively privileged position within society and government and this fact, Marx argues, placed them in essentially the main camp as the financial bourgeoisie"
You see the same pattern emerged.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution#Reign_of_Ter...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Class_Struggles_in_France,...
Note: I do not subscribe to the communist ideology but the fact someone notable had observed the class struggles means common people might have felt more-or-less the same as lot of poor or middle class people today.
We, on the other hand, were happy to move on to a new future containing the best of the revolutionary and the ancien régime, instead of blindly insisting on returning to the status quo ante. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24145281
Note: poor and middle class people today[1] are almost by definition sans-culottes[2].
[1] with the notable exception of those who wear pedal pushers! Due to stretch fabrics, even jodhs and breeches are typically full length.
I mean, being rich or a "Kulak" was a very loose definition of rich and was used more as a political bludgeon, but the idea holds.
Oh, and the common phrase in the rich quarters is rumored to have been “Better Bismarck than Blanqui”, indicating that rich Parisians would rather see France lose the war than have a political foe control the city, which reinforces my suspicions.
I could have been lied to.
Yawn.
Oh Vanity Fair, how vain is thee. Owned by Condé Nast which is in turn owned by one of the 10-15 wealthiest families in America [0]. Excuse me while puke in my mouth as you go on about classism.
Aside: for me Amazon is now useless. Not living in America means I need to filter by the sender being somewhere near me. Unless I am missing something, Amazon doesn't let me filter such.
Motorbike parts used to be airfreight. I am now waiting 8-10 weeks as it comes by sea.
I use eBay now because - as per sibling comment - it lets me filter by where the sender is. For little bits and pieces - silicon tubing etc - I can often find it in my own city. Otherwise I'd have to wait for it to come from America or China...